The Night Crew (25 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

My stomach was rumbling when, at 9:00 p.m., I rolled into the somnolent village of Highland Falls. I knew of a few burger and pizza joints nearby, but my favorite animal is steak so I decided to hunt for a more substantial meal at the Thayer Hotel, on post, just inside the front gate. Besides, I needed some time to think, and, knowing what I now knew, I didn’t really want another confrontation with Katherine. As both an attorney and a career military officer I have spent my life keeping secrets and I’m good at it. Katherine, however, doesn’t play fair. She has an annoying tendency to know what I’m thinking.

I parked in the lower parking lot, hoofed it uphill to the grand old hotel, entered through the impressive front entrance, then hooked a left and went downstairs, where I knew the dining room to be located.

It was late on a weeknight so there wasn’t much of a crowd, just two or three couples, though the receptionist made a big deal of asking if I had a reservation.

To which I replied, “Are you kidding me?”

“No, I am not. Did you call ahead to book a table?”

“Does it matter?”

She awarded me a snooty look, spun about on her heels, then, without another word, led me to a seat in the back room where I was the only customer.

But at least from this rear room I could gaze out the window at the conspicuous splendor of the Hudson Valley and its accompanying river. In early fall, when the trees and vegetation are kaleidoscopic in color, the scenery is worth selling your soul for, though I would recommend settling for the price of a ticket on the Hudson River cruise. In the dead of winter, on the other hand, when the trees are bare and skeletal, it tends to be gray and bleakly depressing.

Thankfully it was nighttime. It was just dark.

A comely waitress appeared and I ordered a steak, well-done, and a Scotch, sans ice, sans water, sans anything that might weaken the brunt. About two minutes later an officer in uniform entered the back of the dining room, and it was Captain Nate Willborn who, apparently, had failed to book a reservation as well. He was alone, as was I, and his face revealed his initial surprise at seeing me, followed by a lame attempt to not recognize who I was—no doubt accompanied by an urge to bolt from the room.

I quickly stood and put on my most winsome smile. “Good evening, Captain Willborn.” This forced him to acknowledge me with a limp wave. I asked, “Would you care to join me?”

He quickly surveyed the room as though he was searching for a party he was expecting, which, under the circumstances, was a contest between phony and ridiculous. “Relax, Captain. This is personal, not professional.”

A look of resignation came over his face and he moved toward me. I stuck out my hand and he shook it. Avoiding my eyes, he told me, “I’m not sure this is a good idea. Isn’t there some kind of legal stricture about personal interactions between witnesses and an attorney you will meet in court?”

“Trust me, I’m a lawyer,” I answered, and even managed a perfectly straight face. “If such a rule existed, I would certainly have heard of it,” I informed him, forgetting to mention that I had heard of it. “We’ll keep it safe. The first one who mentions Al Basari buys the drinks.”

He shuffled his feet, then sort of fell into the chair across from mine.

I asked him, “Can I call you Nate? It is Nate, right?”

“That’s right, sir. If you wish. What should I call you?”

“Sir will be fine.” I laughed and he joined me.

I told him, “But for tonight, I prefer Sean.”

“Sean . . . fine.” Many regular officers regard those of us in the specialty branches—military doctors, shrinks, lawyers, and so forth—as civilians in uniform and it is not uncommon to use first names instead of the formality of ranks. There are even days when I think I am a civilian.

He recovered a bit of his composure and confidence. “I wasn’t aware you were a guest of the hotel.”

“Neither was I.” I signaled the waitress to come over, then explained to Nate, “But I stayed here a few times as a kid. My father was a grad. He dragged me up for a few reunions and we always stayed here. I thought I’d relive my youth tonight.”

The waitress arrived and Willborn ordered a gin and tonic and, for dinner, pork chops. He relaxed back into his chair, and I had the impression that he already had the benefit of a few drinks under his belt, which is how I like my witnesses. He confirmed this suspicion, telling me, “I just left the tavern. A few of us got together for drinks.”

“All veterans of the prison?” He nodded, and I asked, “What was that like?”

“In a word . . . weird.” He looked down at his silverware. “It was real different over there. There wasn’t time for socializing. Besides, everybody was compartmentalized. Jailors, intel people, security people, contractors . . . you work in the same place but might as well be in different worlds.”

“Do you see them in a different light back here?”

“You know, you do. Take Colonel Eggers, for example.”

“What about him?”

“Over there, he was
the man
. He might not look like much, but he walked in the shadow of God. He was the commandant of the prison, the commander of the MP battalion, and when he spoke, the ground trembled.”

“How does he look now?”

“Like a flabby, balding, middle-aged man scared shitless that his ass is hanging out in the wind.” He shook his head. “He was drunk on his ass when I left him. Kept whining about how he’s being screwed.” He added, “Your name came up in that conversation.”

I smiled, and Willborn smiled back. It’s always nice to know you put a scare into the opponent’s witnesses. The waitress arrived with our drinks, and I told her, “Bring two more.”

So we chatted awhile, mostly about personal stuff that was totally inconsequential and irrelevant, but was good cover while I worked on getting more booze into Willborn. He was from a small town outside Boston, attended Boston College, was commissioned via ROTC, like me, and was still single, a status, he informed me, that was not likely to change as he was under orders to return to Iraq the moment the trial was over for another year-long tour.

I wanted him relaxed with me, and with himself, and the next three gin and tonics took him not quite to three sheets to the wind, but judging from his speech, which was becoming slurred, and his physical mannerisms, which were clumsy, two definitely were fluttering in the breeze. Willborn was slick and obsessively self-controlled, but alcohol was not permitted in the war zone, and, after ten dry months in Iraq, he obviously had lost some of his tolerance. Personally, if I had to spend a year without booze I would go looking for an IED. These people are real patriots.

I eventually asked him, “Are you going to be a lifer?”

“I was,” he answered. “I’m not so sure anymore.”

“What changed your mind?”

He seemed to think about this, then informed me, “The war. Al Basari.” He added, after a moment, “The way the army’s hanging us all out to dry over this case.”

“You were the first one to say Al Basari. Drinks are on you, and I’m thirsty.”

He shrugged.

I signaled the waiter and ordered two more. Nate took that as an invitation to finish off his gin and tonic, which he emptied in one long slug.

I looked at him and figured it was either make my move now, or watch him get too shit-faced to speak coherently, so I casually mentioned to Willborn, “I was in Iraq for a while.”

“Were you?”

“My travel agent fucked up. I distinctly told her Bermuda.”

“You should fire her.”

“Instead, I referred her to everybody I don’t like at the office.”

He chuckled. “Where were you assigned?”

“Baghdad. I didn’t mind the insurgents nearly as much as the brass. War brings out the micromanager in all of them. It’s like they tell you how many shakes to give your dick after you piss.”

“Tell me about it.” He was looking around for the waitress hauling his next drink. “They were squeezing my balls so hard at Al Basari, I—” He spotted the waitress and stopped midsentence while she placed his drink on the table. He took a long swig, then completed that thought. “Like, we’d get a new prisoner, and the next morning the Colonel was already busting our balls. What do you have, why haven’t you broken this guy yet?”

I feigned ignorance and said, “I know very little about interrogations. Is that unreasonable?”

“Absurd. Most people over there don’t understand what we do, how interrogations work, and they demanded overnight results, like you give us a prisoner and we have some mind-reading machine and we can empty their brains. It doesn’t work that way. But I’m sure the colonel was getting his balls busted by the people back in the Green Zone—shit flows downhill, right?”

“And Al Basari was the gutter.”

“Not true. We had to get on our tiptoes to look up at the gutter.” He watched the cute waitress for a moment, then said, “Thing is, Ashad and I were getting the ringleaders of the insurgency. Hard men. They were usually older, more self-confident, definitely more dedicated and tougher than the foot soldiers.”

“So they were more difficult to break?”

He took another long, deep swig. I had the sense that he knew what I was up to, getting him tipsy enough to break down his pathological reserve, but maybe he was past caring. Or maybe, being an interrogator himself, he was enjoying the role reversal, the thrill of being the prey in the chase for a change.

I recalled how I always felt when I came back from war zones where life seems to move at a thousand miles an hour, where every little thing becomes a matter of life and death, you wonder if every drive is your last, every road, every building, and every dead dog looks like a host for the grim reaper, as, too often, they are. It’s exhilarating, the ultimate test of manhood, the biggest adventure a human being can experience. But also, it scares the shit out of you.

Then, suddenly, you are back in the good ole USA where the greatest concern is whether Britney Spears is wearing her underpants that day, or which stupid rock star or movie star overindulged in drugs and made a trip to the morgue. The human mind is a remarkably adaptive organ, but unlike the human body it does not slow down the instant it crosses the finish line; nor does it adjust well to the sudden decompression from praying you don’t get your dick blown off, to the pointless chatter and trivialized garbage that is modern American culture.

There is a period, a sort of turbo-lag in reverse, where the mind is still on the razor’s edge, overly attentive, hypersensitive, and ultra-starved for a burst of testosterone.

Indeed, I found it curious that Nate Willborn was already on orders to return for another tour of duty in Iraq, for the only way for that to happen was that he volunteered for a quick turnaround. This suggested that he either felt out of place here, or left unresolved issues back there, or both.

He finished contemplating my question and replied, “Every one of them was a bitch to break. Ordinarily, it could take months of methodical, back-breaking effort.”

“But surely, there had to be a reason the command assigned so many tough cases to your team. Don’t be modest, Nate. You were good at it.”

“It’s not about modesty,” he answered. “Ashad broke them.”

“But you and Ashad were a team,” I told him. “Ashad worked for you. Whatever successes he had, you both get credit. You both
deserved
credit.”

“Look, it wasn’t like that. We were a team in name only. He did his thing, I did mine.”

I took a sip of Scotch. I couldn’t tell if Willborn was sober enough that he was still trying to get his distance from what Ashad did over there, or if he was venting something deeper, something definitely more interesting. What I could tell was that he didn’t have a fucking clue that Amal Ashad was still alive, which seemed to confirm what he was saying; Ashad had been a solo act, and vice versa.

I told him, “Well, it’s too bad Ashad died.”

“Is it?”

“I wish I had a chance to meet him. The impression I have is that he could get anybody to squeal.” I smiled and added, a bit disingenuously, “I could use some pointers.”

Willborn put down his drink, planted his elbows on the table, and leaned forward. “He was a dangerous asshole!” he replied with a burst of vehemence I found surprising. “Arrogant, conceited, selfish, manipulative. He looked down at the rest of us because we weren’t born in Iraq, and didn’t graduate from some Ivy League tower. It was all about him. He didn’t believe in sharing. He took all the credit for everything.”

“Come now, Nate. He couldn’t have been that bad.”

“Of course, you never had to work beside him, so you have no way of knowing how . . . he could seem very nice and even charming, but he had his own agenda. He didn’t really care about anyone else but himself. He was—” whatever Nate was about to say, he seemed to realize that he was going on and he halted midsentence. He broke eye contact with me and looked around the room for the waitress. He even yelled, “Hey . . . what do I have to do to get another drink around here?”

But he was also self-aware enough to recognize that he had exposed a little more than he wanted about the relationship between himself and Ashad. After a moment, he said, in a quiet voice, “Look, I was very sad when he died. Getting blown to pieces that way . . . I guess . . . you know . . . well, nobody deserves to go like that.”

Actually, it sounded like Willborn thought Ashad got exactly what he deserved. Anyway, the waitress arrived carrying my steak dinner in her right hand, his pork chops in her left. She was just setting them on the table when he looked at me and complained, “I . . . uh, I’m not feeling very well.”

“Relax, Nate, the cure just arrived. Food will make you feel better.”

“I’m sorry.” He got to his feet. “I . . . I have to go back to my room. I think I’m going to be sick.” And with that, he spun around and rushed out of the restaurant.

The waitress looked at me. “Will your friend be returning?”

“He’s not my friend.”

“Oh . . . well—”

“And no, I think somebody disagrees with his stomach.”

She looked confused.

“Wrap it up in a doggie bag, and have it delivered to his room. His name is Willborn.” I added, “Let me put a note on it.”